As I remembered Grandpa in the hours after he died, I thought of 1 John 3.1-3.

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.

I struggled with my memories of Grandpa that night. Each memory was good without giving me comfort. In fact, some of my most important memories of him were like a slap in the face. Grandpa is gone. I won’t see him again in this life. There were some gifts that only he could give because he was Grandpa, and no one can replace him. Though I can remember what he gave, he won’t give anything more.

The words from John helped me understand something about Grandpa’s life and death. Meditate on them with me.

John’s point is that the Father has given us a unique relationship. Look, John says, at “what kind of love” the Father has given. John doesn’t marvel that there is so much of God’s love, or that God’s love toward us is so deep, but that God’s love is a specific kind. His love is the kind that calls us his children.

John explains what he means elsewhere in this letter. Human beings are sinners, and have no fellowship with God (1.6, 8). So we do not become his children because we love him, but because he loves us first. And the Father loved us by giving his Son Jesus on the cross to pay for our sins (4.10). When we believe in Christ, John says that we are “born of God,” that God “abides in us” (4.13-16; 5.1).

The love that calls us children of God is the kind that bought us a second birth in Christ.

Grandpa believed these things. He and Grandma realized who Jesus is and began to follow him at a Billy Graham crusade. Grandpa knew that God’s love is not a generic benevolence, but a sacrificing love.

The next statement John makes is stark. He describes the alienation between the world and the Father. “The reason why the world did not know us,” John says of himself and the other apostles, “is that it did not know him.” John also explains and repeats this statement throughout his letter. There is no darkness is God, and darkness does not have any fellowship with him (1.5-6). “Do not love the world or the things in the world,” John writes (2.15). “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

This kind of alienation from the world was something Grandpa knew too. He told me that, before he started following Christ, he had been made Sunday school director at his church. Grandpa realized that he had been in charge of teaching children about Christ, but hadn’t been following Christ. So he went to the pastor and resigned.  The pastor didn’t see that Grandpa’s lack of personal experience with Christ made any difference, and declined his resignation. Grandpa was astonished. “You mean, it doesn’t matter to you whether your Sunday school director is a Christian?” A major reason why he and Grandma moved here in 1955 was the realization that their church didn’t think being “born of God” was important.

In fact, the new birth is constantly being downgraded from essential to optional. Those of us who claim to follow Christ tend to rejoice in our sins being paid without looking too carefully over the itemized bill. The logic of John—the logic of the Bible as a whole—is relentless on this point: sins by nature are destructive and incur a cost. Grandpa’s sins were costly. His redemption came at a price. The logic drives on: if that cost is paid for me, then I do not belong to myself anymore. Grandpa struggled to reach that conclusion. And so we all do. We sometimes wish that we could take some of the world’s plastic into the streets of gold.

John’s next sentence is the reason I thought of these verses the night Grandpa died. “We are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared.” There are two points in those words. He says we have this amazing identity right now: we are God’s children. All the acceptance, security, and love of God’s household belong to us. The story has passed the turning-point. But then John says that we can’t picture what we will be. The Last Day hasn’t come. Our final image hasn’t downloaded yet. The story isn’t over.

So when Grandpa was with us, he belonged in the Father’s household. He was a child of God. But there is more to Grandpa that remains hidden.

These words from John helped me because I realized that the best gifts I received from Grandpa were from Christ. In this life, Grandpa was born of God, and the many good things Grandpa gave were the overflow of that new birth.

Some of those things were simple.

He knew how to delight and amaze his grandkids. He could twist an apple in half with his bare hands. He made all sorts of toys: trucks, puzzles, guns. He taught me the first lessons I can remember in creativity. When I was 8 or 9, I asked if he would make me a rifle. All I had in mind was the shape of a rifle cut out of wood. Grandpa went to his shop, drew a rifle onto a scrap of plywood, and proceeded to cut it out. But I could see that the barrel was way too short. I was worried. Didn’t Grandpa know about rifles? Didn’t he know that the whole point of a rifle was the long barrel? I gently pointed this out to him, but he didn’t seem concerned at all. So I figured it could still pass for a sawed-off shotgun. But Grandpa had other ideas. What I thought was the barrel was actually just the stock. For the barrel he used a couple feet of half-inch PVC pipe. When the bad guys saw me coming with that rifle, they all ran.

The first lesson in creativity was, “Don’t rush the genius.” The second was, “A creation is the best gift.”

Grandpa could be extremely funny. He was the master of deadpan storytelling. I can’t tell his masterpiece the way he told it, but I can give you the gist.

Across the road from the family home was a field that Grandpa was clearing, and in the field was a stump. He decided that, instead of cutting the stump out, it’d be faster to blast it. So he went to town to buy dynamite from the only place you could get it, and that was the Baptist pastor’s wife. She sold him the dynamite, but she gave him some advice. “Don’t pack too much under the stump. Only use a little.”

He nodded but thought, “What does she know?”

When he was finished packing all the explosives he had under the stump, he lit the fuse and took off running. The blast shot the stump into the air, past Grandpa, across the road, over the family home, and into the back yard.

Moral: listen to the pastor’s wife.

The simple gifts are worth a lot, whether a toy or a tall tale. But some of the things Grandpa gave me were deeper.

I worked with him on his rentals for two summers as a teenager. I learned from working alongside him, and I learned from watching how he related to people—open, polite, understated. I saw these things and more because he gave me time.

He also gave me understanding.

One summer I preached a sermon at a Free Church youth conference in Denver in front of a panel of three judges. I was seventeen. My model for public speaking was William F. Buckley, Jr. When I finished and sat down with my youth pastor, Dan Tedder, and the judges, one of them held up my notes and said, “What is this? What are you trying to do?”

Grandpa was on the church board at the time, and he heard from Dan about how the judges reacted. A couple weeks later Grandpa and I were reroofing one of the 7^th Street houses, and somehow we started talking about Denver. He stopped, set his hammer down, and said, “I heard what that judge said about your sermon. That wasn’t right. You just keep following the path you’re on, and the Lord will use you.”

I was blessed in my teens to have people in my life who understood me, my parents and Dan Tedder included. Grandpa’s gift of understanding at that moment was powerful.

John’s words helped me understand that Grandpa’s gifts to me really came from Christ’s work in Grandpa. God used Grandpa’s gifts to stir and strengthen my spiritual life, and I continue to grow because of them.

John’s next words helped me understand Grandpa’s death. “But we know that when [Christ] appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” John picks up the idea that we don’t know yet what we will be in eternity. The end of the story is when Christ returns. We will finally have an unobstructed view of him. No more speculation about what he is really like, no more wondering what he would do or say. We will see Christ as he is, and John says we will then become like him—just the way children learn.

What is Christ like? Glorious, gentle, meek, true, life-giving, gracious, loving.

Grandpa had some of those qualities some of the time, and because he was a child of God those good things built us up. Now Grandpa sees Christ as he is. Grandpa is like Christ. He has all of Christ’s qualities eternally. His story is finished.

John’s last words in these verses give us a glimpse of Christian integrity. “And everyone who thus hopes in [Christ] purifies himself as he is pure.” We don’t purify ourselves by willing away our sins, nor by rationalizing them. We purify ourselves by setting our hope as God’s children on the Last Day, the hope that we will see Jesus Christ in his perfection, and that we’ll become complete in him. This hope arouses us to reject the plastic gloss of this world and strive for the prize of the upward call.

An opinion piece about A.D.D. medications by L. Alan Sroufe was published in the New York Times on Saturday. “Ritalin Gone Wrong” remained on the Times‘s most emailed list Tuesday. Also published on Saturday was “An Appointment With Dread”, one of a series of online pieces about anxiety medications. The article by Alissa Nutting was also still hanging out on the most emailed list two days later.

A third article about meds and behavior was published the same day. “Are We Ready for a ‘Morality Pill’?” was written by the well-known (infamous?) philosopher Peter Singer and researcher Agata Sagan.

All of these pieces deal with the predisposition problem: our behavior seems to be determined by factors beyond our control. We would very much like our predispositions to be biochemical, so that we could jump our ethical and emotional gaps with the momentum of dosage.

Singer and Sagan argue that, if biochemistry predisposes our actions, and if one can demonstrate differences in brain chemistry between ethical and unethical people — the criterion in their article is reduced to empathy — then free will is not really a factor in human behavior. So why not take a pill to become better?

(Empathy equals good ethics. It’s hard to know who was more sophomoric, the writers of the piece or the editors who said, “Yeah, that’s a worthwhile contribution to the millennia of Western thought.”)

Nutting gives readers a hilarious look at daily life spent inside an anxious mind, and a less funny peek at how to connive the desired prescriptions out of a doctor. The longevity of her article on the most-emailed list suggests that she is hitting more than people’s funny-bone. I hear reviews of anti-anxiety drugs in conversation as if they were films or smart phones.

Sroufe’s article is substantive, rigorous, and devastating. He has been studying the psychological development of troubled children for four decades, long enough to see how a supposition about A.D.D. led to a 20-fold increase in the consumption of Ritalin and Adderall over the last 30 years.

The supposition has been that A.D.D. is rooted in biochemistry, and that it is therefore treatable with medication. In the early 1970s, children with A.D.D. who took the drugs showed better ability to concentrate than those who didn’t. Open-and-shut. Parents and teachers dealing with behavioral problems day in, day out needed no more proof.

But there are problems.

Ritalin and Adderall, Sroufe points out, are stimulants. They do not calm children. The short-term increase in concentration results from heightened excitement. By 1990, researchers had thought to ask, “How do these drugs affect children who don’t have A.D.D.?” Srouf surveyed the literature and documented that “all children … responded to stimulant drugs the same way.” In fact, “versions of these drugs had been given to World War II radar operators to help them stay awake and focus on boring, repetitive tasks.”

Sroufe writes, “To date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavioral problems, the very things we would most want to improve.” Children’s bodies simply adapt to the stimulants.

He rejects the idea that A.D.D. is a biochemical problem. He says hard evidence doesn’t establish a link. On the contrary, his own studies point to environment as the culprit. He has followed 200 children born into poverty since 1975. “What we found was that the environment of the child predicted development of A.D.D. problems.” Policy-makers don’t seem too interested in that conclusion.

Young people are taught very few moral principles. The only one that I hear them repeat consistently is the responsibility to “take your meds.” If you don’t set your brain chemistry right, you make poor choices. To be sure, there is a relationship between the body and the emotions. Treating the body properly changes your outlook. But those insights don’t automatically yield moral and spiritual health.

We are not dealing with the predisposition problem seriously. By attempting to solve it with pills, we have created a society that is ethically helpless.

The victory of Newt Gingrich in South Carolina puts evangelicals and other social conservatives at a crossroads. Gingrich by any measure is morally equal to Bill Clinton, upon whom social conservatives released so much rhetorical lava in the 1990s. Yet one of the GOP’s most traditionalist states has just told its delegates to vote for Gingrich at the convention.

The message is hard to misunderstand. South Carolina Republicans could have voted for three family men whose private morality is unquestioned. Ron Paul is one. Mitt Romney lives the way social conservatives say public men should live. His pro-life credentials are weak, but no weaker than George H. W. Bush’s were. Rick Santorum also walks the family walk, and has the additional advantage of being publicly acclaimed by evangelical leaders at a summit in Texas.

No deal. It’s Gingrich.

According to exit polls, Gingrich won almost every voter category, including independents. Women favored him 38% to Romney’s 29%. Married people favored him over Romney 41% to 28%. Gingrich won both “somewhat” and “very” conservative voters by large margins. He swept evangelicals with 44%. Romney and Santorum each took 21% of evangelicals, meaning that even their combined vote wouldn’t have beaten Gingrich.

The conclusion is inescapable: the people who wanted President Clinton removed, and who only recently heaved Mark Sanford (R) from the governor’s office for his notorious adultery, just said that adultery doesn’t matter in Gingrich’s case.

The hypocrisy cannot be healed by excuses such as:

1. Christianity is really about forgiveness.

Rick Perry used the line when he endorsed Gingrich. And, to be sure, there’s something in this forgiveness thing. But some evangelicals in the 90s, notably Tony Campolo, tried to alert evangelicals to the gospel’s potential for President Clinton, and got the smack-down. Is forgiveness only for Republicans?

2. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy that uses the politics of personal destruction.

Yes, the ABC interview with Gingrich’s ex-wife was transparently an attempt to sway the South Carolina primary. It was too exquisitely timed. But, when the words were “vast right-wing conspiracy,” social conservatives scoffed.

3. The accusations against President Clinton were never about sex, but about his perjury.

Yes, the impeachment process was about perjury. But what really bothered social conservatives at the time was Bill Clinton’s cultural significance. He was not merely a 1960s liberal, but a 1960s libertine. He represented the triumph of moral relativism and the mainstreaming of sexual immorality. Or so they said. Why not Gingrich? Why doesn’t his behavior equally symbolize the decline of sexual ethics? Symbolize it more?

Bottom line: social conservatives in Bob Jones country voted for Gingrich because they think he can win. And that’s always the bottom line in politics, left and right.

I do not believe Clinton’s or Gingrich’s transgressions tell us much about American culture, in the 1990s or today. In fact, public presidential immorality has been worse in the past. Grover Cleveland assumed responsibility for an illegitimate child in 1884, going on to serve two terms as president. The public shame of such politicians is just the continuing story of power. For the story of American culture, we have to examine what ordinary people do.

I’m one of many pastors have been arguing for years that the evangelical political machine is wrong both about the gospel and politics. Those who believe we can take back our culture through political means, and who have been selling us politicians for the last 25 years, have yet to show one cultural transformation. They keep stumbling over their spin. They have failed to understand that the political process rarely shapes culture, but is culture’s slave.

The only hope for transforming our nation is for evangelicals to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to people’s hearts. When we get our message clear again, we will see God change lives, and our culture will change as a result. Pastors are doing this with leaders of both parties, choosing to see them as men and women who need counsel, healing, and repentance rather than as enemies who should be crushed. Leaders like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. If followers of Christ never said another word about pro-family policies and spoke only of the restoring power of Christ through his death and resurrection, we would be amazed at the results.

The power-game will always be with us. It’s past time for us to choose Christ instead.

The value we place on human life may be revealed in ordinary self-restraint.

While the exact causes of the Costa Concordia tragedy may not be any clearer today, the story of the evacuation unfolded all too clearly over the weekend. There seems to have been a total breakdown of order as the ship capsized.

Surviving passengers recounted how the crew gave false reassurances, then abandoned their posts. The scenes were described as “every man for himself,” with no consideration for women and children, or for the elderly. Two bodies discovered inside the ship over the weekend were elderly men wearing life jackets. The captain insists that he was the last to leave the ship, but the bodies of those two men reply, “We were still here when you set foot onshore.” Fifteen others are still missing.

The value of others on the Concordia was obviously lower than the value of Self.

For many decades now, Americans and Europeans have valued personal authenticity over social norms. We like to think each person is autonomous, free from artificial bonds. The Self is holy. Duties are anathema. The very word order has become almost contemptible, regarded by many as code for repression. And so the passengers of the Concordia endured not just the violence of a sinking ship but the fury of personal authenticity in a panic.

We’ve heard about the thin line between civilization and barbarism. We’ve seen that line crossed in macrocosm (Iraq after the invasion) and microcosm (Walmart mobs on Black Friday). On the Concordia, passengers were dining comfortably one moment, and in the next were crawling on their knees through broken glass, lashing themselves to railings, and passing their 2-year-olds to a stranger in the hope that she might think of a child rather than herself.

We have also seen the line maintained. New York City did not collapse into an orgy of personal authenticity on 9-11. Its citizens showed why order is noble. Our soldiers around the world don’t abandon their units under fire. And there were passengers on the Concordia who remained calm, nursed the wounded, and gave leadership.

Every day, we show the value we place on human life in our small actions. Giving place to the elderly, showing self-restraint in front of children and gentleness to women — or, to use the old-fashioned phrase for these actions, showing deference — these are the ways we acknowledge another person’s worth.

They are also society’s rehearsals for emergency. What we do in danger depends on what we practice in safety.

I think our society has big reserves of civility. But we are tolerating disrespect in too many ways. People who spew foul language in front of children, who refuse to defer to flight attendants, school teachers, or police, who are incapable of respecting the elderly, and who treat women as valuable only if they are hotties — and then only give the reward of crudity — are rehearsing a fresh Concordia experience for the rest of us.

It’s time we gave them the smack-down.

Two stories popped up Monday morning about Oakland, CA. One reported that there were anti-police protests in the city Saturday night. The other detailed the rise in homicides last year.

The homicide story was wrenching, not just because the total number of killings hit 110 but also because three small children were among the slain. A 5-year-old was shot beside his father’s taco truck. A 3-year-old was shot while being pushed by his mother in his stroller. An 23-month-old in his father’s arms was shot in the head. This last shooting made headlines nationally because it occurred at the taping of a rap video.

An activist named Todd Walker attended at least 50 of the funerals for these homicide victims. He said, “Safe streets should be the main priority of this city, period! There are no more excuses.”

The Oakland police were busy on the streets Saturday night quelling the violent march by about 100 self-identified members of Occupy Oakland. The protesters threw bottles, broke shop windows, slashed tires, and vandalized a media van. One of the six arrested had a quarter-stick of dynamite. Police were busy with occupy protesters last Thursday as well, when a number tried to push their way into city hall. Last month, occupiers succeeded in shutting down the Port of Oakland — and in provoking the hostility of unions whose workers lost wages because of the stunt. Last fall, Occupy Oakland was one of the camps most notorious in the nation for violence and drugs.

Saturday night, the occupiers decried police violence. They said they would organize a weekly “F– the Police” protest.

Some occupiers claim that they cannot control everyone in their marches, attempting to shift responsibility for violence to “anarchists.” This video offers some examples:

OAKLAND: Damage from violent weekend Occupy protest leads….

Those excuses won’t cut it. A blogger makes the case for the occupiers’ tolerant attitude toward violence here (profanity heads-up).

The mainstream ethic of occupiers seems to be:

1. Your grievances justify your criminality, if that’s how you choose to handle stuff.

2. I am not implicated in what you do. I have no responsibility as a citizen to stop violence or vandalism when I see it.

3. The police have no right to use force against protesters.

First reality check: there are protest marches across the United States every week that do not degenerate into crime. The marches are often loud, confrontational, and provocative, but Americans know how to make strong statements without violence.

Second reality check: you cannot have a real community without accepting your responsibility to speak up when crime is being committed.

Third reality check: criminality escalates. A confident society empowers the police to use force against criminals. I am not endorsing police brutality, nor am I denying that police corruption is a serious problem. But a society that claims to be “above” the use of force against criminals, or that has a guilty conscience about using force, ends up with dead toddlers in its streets.

This is not merely about Oakland, or the occupiers. Citizens of London got that third reality check last year. Even little Chico is being affected by rising violence (cf. #3 in the editorial). Rising violence is everywhere. This is also not about “social” justice. Crime is about simple justice, the priority of order. We have a right to walk the streets without fearing for the safety of our kids. Hat-tip to police officers who do their best to secure that right every day.

When I watched Rick Santorum’s debate performances over the last several months, I was struck by two things. First, his answers were unusually direct and fluent. He didn’t waste time trying to be charming (like Rick Perry) or delivering scripted zingers (like Michelle Bachmann). He seemed to have no use for evasion. His answers showed that he had become effective taking questions from small groups. Second, he routinely tied his answers to the concerns of Iowans, mentioning their towns and counties with the ease of a man who’d spent a year touring them.

It reminded me of John Kerry’s strategy in 2004, disappearing from the national radar as an apparently hopeless candidate wandering ridiculously local precincts. Then he won the caucuses, snatched New Hampshire, and secured the nomination. It helped that Kerry had a post-Iowa plan, and as a northeasterner could make a serious instant play for the Granite State.

Last night, Santorum came within 8 votes of winning Iowa.

Unlike Mike Huckabee, who ran a classic insurgent, seat-of-the-pants campaign after his Iowa win in 2008, Santorum appears to have planned for the campaign after Iowa, and planned realistically. In addition, Santorum is deeper than Huckabee was in expertise and experience. Further, as a Pennsylvanian, he is a near neighbor to New Hampshire — hardly comparable to a southerner running up there. Santorum also has advantages among the candidates that Huckabee lacked. Bachmann is out of the race this morning. Perry went back in Texas. With Newt Gingrich going negative against Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, just as Romney pounded Gingrich in Iowa, I don’t see any reason why Santorum isn’t well-placed to win the first primary.

His main problem is that he has not passed the plausibility tests of what Mark Halperin called the Gang of 500, the media and political heavyweights candidates court before anyone votes. Santorum has never been regarded as serious by this group. National Review, only a couple months ago, referred to him as a “no-hoper.”

But the group of Americans who will determine which way the 2012 elections go, blue collar voters, don’t give a rip what the Gang of 500 thinks. In the dynamic of identity politics, in which people vote for the candidate who most represents their status and way of life, Santorum has the opportunity to walk away with blue collar voters. He lives where they live, and he has a family story that is compelling to them. When he says the word work, his inflection is their inflection.

Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and Bachmann have all demonstrated the power of this identification, but lacked the political seriousness and intellect to give it shape. They are creatures of cable: glib, not substantive. On the campaign trial, they seemed to believe that soundbites really would win out.

Santorum may stumble. He may have a secret like Herman Cain. More likely, he may not be able to create the structure of a national campaign quickly enough. If so, he will lose this opportunity. But I’ll go out on a limb: I think he’ll lock up the blue collar vote.

Predictions aside, the lesson I take from Iowa is that media dominance over society is an illusion.

Presidential campaigns prove every four years that it is street appeal and a solid game on the ground that puts a candidate over the top on election day. These two things have to be real. They cannot be produced through media, and the history of presidential campaigns is littered with candidates who’ve tried. To be sure, the two can be expressed through media, and must be. The campaign that best expresses the candidate’s street appeal through media and integrates its ground game with media will win. But no medium replaces shoe leather.

That is the ongoing relevance of Iowa and New Hampshire to American politics.

And this lesson is a healthy correction to the superficiality that congests our nation’s life. No business will survive without addition and subtraction actually revealing a profit. A volunteer organization cannot serve the community with a polished image. No church will build people up with Christianish entertainment, demographically driven activities, and happy slogans.

Down with marketing. Up with work.

Since June, I have nearly abandoned this blog. Apologies to my faithful readers. I am finally able to resume posting.

You may know that this year has been full of personal changes, not least of which are a new ministry in Chico, CA, and a Ph.D. program at Southern Seminary in Louisville, KY.

I just finished my first semester of coursework at Southern, and the experience is invigorating. I spent the autumn reading and researching extensively for a seminar on Christianity and film, and then spent eleven days at Southern with my fellow students and professors. The other students are sharp in discussion and debate. The professors are both challenging and supportive. Some of the fruit of this program will find its way into posts here soon.

A Ph.D. program is all-consuming, so I won’t be writing any books for some years. Re-starting a church is all-consuming too, and I find myself doing the two large projects at once.

I moved from the Orland Evangelical Free Church to Grace Brethren Church in April. At the time, the move was seen by many believers in Chico as incomprehensible. The gardeners of gossip around town had pronounced GBC closed. It was in desperate financial shape, with a predominantly elderly congregation of 60-80, a worn-out facility in a poor location, and a record of splits over the last five years.

The situation now is quite different, due to the resilience and tenacity of the original members, who refused to give up even when their situation seemed impossible.

• Attendance is running between 160 and 180 each Sunday.
• Our largest growth consists of young families.
• The junior high ministry is reaching those who haven’t attended church in the past, with 12-15 at each mid-week meeting.
• Children’s ministry is fully staffed, both in Sunday school and children’s church.
• The exterior of our facility has been repainted and the audio-visual system improved.
• Small groups launched in September, and were immediately full. I believe a new group will begin in January.
• The greeting and ushering teams have been reorganized.
• A comprehensive adult discipleship course was designed during the summer. It launched in October.
• The membership has increased substantially, and has made several important decisions quickly, including adding my brother Chris to the staff as director of operations. The tone and quality of the congregational meetings has been excellent.
• The music team has learned new songs and created new arrangements for corporate singing.
• The elders actively lead in key areas, and are forging great working relationships.
• We met our entire 2011 budget by the end of October. Our cash reserves are therefore well supplied, and we are ready for 2012.

I am very pleased with GBC’s new start. What pleases me most is that there has been no division between the original attenders and the new ones. They have decided to work together, in spite of how fast and, at times, confusing all these changes have been. This period has not been easy for anyone, and the joy we’re experiencing now is hard-earned.

This kind of renewal happens when we realize that the Lord Jesus Christ has poured his vast wealth into his people–talent, experience, and the wisdom that comes from suffering. Recognizing this wealth is hard. Christ has stored in it people who don’t always look right, and who seem to have no advantages. If we are to recognize his wealth, we have to associate with the lowly.

No surprise, then, that the glory for every good thing in every church belongs to the Lord alone.

Rob Bell starts to make an excellent case for the justice of hell in Love Wins. But he doesn’t finish it. Bell’s inadequate concept of justice is the next feature of this book I think evangelicals should watch. (First two features here and here.)

Hell is hard to defend if the people who populate it are the ignorant, needy, and wounded who weren’t able to check the right theological boxes. But the charge depends on sympathy. Switch perspectives on the population, and hell starts to look like the only appropriate punishment.

That’s what Bell does in the middle of his chapter on hell (pp 70-73). There are kids all over Kigali, Rwanda with missing limbs, he says. “Do I believe in a literal hell? Of course. Those aren’t metaphorical missing arms and legs.” A rape victim, a 5-year-old boy whose father committed suicide, the surviving relatives of a man whose cruelty extended beyond the grave: all of these show the ongoing cost of sin.

Bell is aggressive in making this case.

So when people say they don’t believe in hell and they don’t like the word “sin,” my first response is to ask, “Have you ever sat and talked with a family who just found out that their child has been molested? Repeatedly? Over a number of years? By a relative?” (p 72)

I found myself cheering him on as I read this passage. I am a pastor, like Bell. Few have the daily, ongoing experience of evil quite like those on life’s clean-up crew — law enforcement, social workers, doctors and nurses, and pastors. The cost of sin is born day after day in family after family. And the cost mounts. True love demands payment for the sake of those who bear that cost.

But, having adjusted our perspective in this way, having raised the issue of sin’s cost, and having asserted our need for this horrible word hell, Bell switches back to the perspective of the ignorant, needy, and wounded who failed to check the right boxes. Isn’t it monstrous to punish them eternally? Bell asks (p 102), “Have billions of people been created only to spend eternity in conscious punishment and torment, suffering infinitely for the finite sins they committed in the few years they spent on earth?”

Suffering infinitely for finite sins, committed in the few years of life. Our sins, Bell assumes repeatedly in this book, are limited in scope.

Really?
Our sins are finite?
They are?
We have confirmation of this?
Somebody knows this?
Without a doubt?

I am nowhere near granting that assumption, and I have three reasons.

1. The Bible reiterates that our sins are primarily against God, secondarily against one another (e.g. Genesis 39.7-10; Romans 1.18-32). How does Bell propose to limit the cost of sins committed against an infinite being?

2. Human beings live in community. At what point does the impact of a single sin come to rest? A slanderous tweet, let’s say? It’s true that I can lose sight of a sin’s impact, but that doesn’t mean I really know where the impact stops.

3. Human beings are linked generationally. A sin committed at one time can live on. That’s a key part of the problem of racism in the United States. How can we say that Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward his slaves had a finite impact because it was committed in the few years of his own life?

Bell doesn’t follow his own correct reasoning about the cost of sin to its conclusion: The cost goes on to such an extent that no human being knows the full impact of his own actions. And the real problem of justice, as the Bible lays it out, is that all have sinned.

I am surveying features of Rob Bell’s book Love Wins that evangelicals should watch over the coming years. A second feature is Bell’s description of the nature of God.

According to Bell, the evangelical God is impossible for people to trust. This God has put a time-limit on repentance: death is the end of people’s opportunity to have a relationship with him, and hell awaits people who do not believe. Bell says that this sort of God is “violent” and “destructive.” If this account of God were true, he says,

A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with [people] would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony.

If there was an earthly father who was like that, we would call the authorities. If there was an actual human dad who was that volatile, we would contact child protection services immediately. (pp 173-174)

He goes on, calling this God “devastating,” “psychologically crushing,” “terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable.”

Bell counters that God is love, and that God’s invitation into his love never ends. Hell is not God tormenting people, but people choosing to reject God’s love and creating their own torment. Even when they reject God, he always brings them back because redemption is part of his very nature.

Yet Bell’s story about how God redemptive nature displays the same divine volatility Bell finds in the doctrine of eternal hell.

For example, Bell uses the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to make the argument that hell is temporary. He calls them “the poster cities for deviant sinfulness run amok,” recounting how God rained sulfur on the cities, destroying everything. “But this isn’t the last we read of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Bell cites Ezekiel 16, where God says he will return the cities to what they were before, then asks rhetorically, “What appeared to be a final, forever, smoldering, smoking verdict regarding their destiny … wasn’t? What appeared to be over, isn’t. Ezekiel says that where there was destruction there will be restoration.” (p 83, emphasis original)

So God sometimes destroys people to make a point. Then he restores. Bell calls this a “movement from judgment to restoration, from punishment to new life.” (p 85)

Using Bell’s standard of a loving God, his account of what he calls God’s redeeming nature shows the same violence he condemns when discussing eternal torment in hell. The God who destroyed Sodom is the child abuser about whom Bell would call the authorities. The people of Sodom did not choose sulfurous rain; God inflicted it upon them.

The only difference Bell shows between the God who destroyed Sodom and the God who punishes souls eternally is the amount of time involved.

So let’s imagine Rob Bell preaching love and hope to Sodom: “This fire isn’t forever. Your father loves you! He’s inviting you to participate in his love! Just wait: you’ll have another opportunity to love God!”

Or we could ask this question: Would it matter to the people destroyed in the fire of Sodom that their punishment was only temporary? Would they trust God any more, or hate God any less because they have another opportunity later?

Or we could make up a scenario about pain. Suppose I promised you that the Soviet guard in the gulag would only beat you every day for 10 years. Would the temporary nature of the torment make it tolerable? What if he only beats you daily for a week? Okay, okay: your beating will only last 5 minutes.

Bell’s proposal that hell is temporary in no way makes his account of God’s nature coherent.

Celebrity status will not exempt Bell’s arguments from the precision of, say, Richard Dawkins. Evangelicals should watch what happens when Bell’s distinctions without differences fail to make God any more loveable.

Love Wins accepts generalized standards of love and justice — standards that are, to be sure, accepted by most people without examination. But the received wisdom of generalizations about “a loving God” or “a just God” fall apart once we delve into specific cases. “Loving” toward whom? “Just” in whose cause?

I think Bell will have to discard every biblical account of God’s punishing a sinner in order to preserve his view of redemption. That is where I think his “better story” about God will lead. Bell has failed to put human pain in the context of any serious look at the requirements of justice.

The publication of Rob Bell’s Love Wins marks the acceptance of emergent Christianity by the American mainstream. Bell has been featured in a Time cover story, and is now a reference point for all sorts of popular spiritual writing. The pantheon of the American empire now includes Bell’s Jesus.

Over several posts, I’ll discuss some features of this book that I think will be most important for evangelicals in the coming years.

The first feature: Bell denies that biblical doctrine has significance in human salvation. The Bible contains teachings, sure. But knowing them is problematic, both interpretively, in finding what they mean, and morally, in maintaining humility.

Bell’s denial that doctrinal belief is essential to salvation is explicit, coming in his discussion of Jesus’ claim in John 14.6: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Bell does not deny the exclusivity inherent in that statement. But Bell argues,

What [Jesus] doesn’t say is how, or when, or in what manner the mechanism functions that gets people to God through him. He doesn’t even state that those coming to the Father through him will even know that they are coming exclusively through him. He simply claims that whatever God is doing in the world to know and redeem and love and restore the world is happening through him. (p 154)

Love wins, Bells argues (pp 144-157), because Jesus is the sustaining power of all creation, and he saves people no matter what they do or believe, wooing them through recurring opportunities to embrace him.

The denial of doctrine’s significance is also implicit, a denial through method. Bell is a deconstructionist.

Bell’s claim that Jesus never specifies how people are saved illustrates neatly. It is exegetically preposterous on its face. In the very document Bell discusses, Jesus repeatedly links salvation with belief, as in John 12.44-50, where Jesus makes “the word I have spoken” a person’s judge on the last day, and where he declares that the Father has given him “a commandment — what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life.”

(Indeed, Bell quotes a fragment of that paragraph [p 159], in which Jesus says he came to save the world, not to judge. But Jesus said that in order to set up his word as judge, and belief in his word as the “mechanism” that saves.)

Such bits of trivia don’t matter to Bell. The Bible for him is not a revelation of God’s truth. Rather, it is full of the raw materials for God’s story: poems, riddles, metaphors, hints, dribs and drabs of ancient cultural perspectives. We are supposed to find God’s story in those materials. Bell complains that historic Christianity has told a story that’s bad, having hardened all the raw material into absolutes. There’s “a better story” (pp 110-111).

This view of the Bible creates a new role for exegesis.

We expound the Bible not so much to learn what is true, as to deconstruct our own preconceptions. So, Bell offers long passages studying such words as hades, gehenna, aeon, et al., not to build up our understanding of what these words mean, but to tear it down. By the time Bell is done with text after text, we no longer know what the words mean. And with traditional concepts safely deconstructed, Bell is free to pick from those materials and tell his better story.

Many conservative theologians are saying that Bell is a theological liberal. To be sure, many of his conclusions are indistinguishable from the old liberalism. But I want to register one qualification that puts Bell and many emergents in a different category.

Modernist liberals 150 years ago believed that the Bible’s teachings were knowable, and that our reasoning about texts added to our knowledge. It is not clear to me at all that Bell believes this. Bell seems to believe that knowledge itself is a kind of arrogance, and that doctrinal knowledge, in terms of the fate of every person who ever lived, is of no significance.

Evangelicals should watch this feature of Love Wins to see whether Bell is merely being fashionable, or whether he is flirting with nihilism.